Shipstar (28 page)

“Even if it’s technically sound,” Redwing said, leaning forward with hands clamped together on the table. “There’s the big question—is this maneuver understandable enough for the ship Artilects to operate, to troubleshoot, and to extend what they’ve learned?”

Beth said, “Our flight in, up the jet—the Nav Artilect group certainly learned from that.”

Ayaan Ali’s face became veiled, remembering. “You’re right. When I came on duty, I was amazed at how much they could do. Remember when we had trouble with the scoop getting enough mass to fuse it in our core chamber? They adjusted the field structure before I could even grasp what was wrong. They’d never done that in our field trials out in the Oort cloud.”

The talk got technical. They all ran with it. The deep silent secret of
SunSeeker
was the collaboration between mere mortal humans and the crystal Artilects who knew much that the vagrant human mind could not hold in ready use. The Artilects managed innumerable details at a speed and accuracy far beyond the blunt comprehension of their fragile cargo. They were integrated artificial minds, merged into a collective intellect. A society of minds, furiously engaged. Redwing always thought of them as crew who rarely talked back. They kept track of innumerable daily problems and never complained. The Insys Artilect, especially; he spoke with it several times every watch. On the other hand, they never had really original ideas.

Clare said sternly, “Their attention reservoirs can take only so much—”

“Let’s leave that to experience,” Redwing cut in. “Officer Conway,” with a nod to Clare, “consult the Artilects themselves. Give them your simulations; ask them to appraise their
own
capabilities. Regard them as crew members who couldn’t make it to this meeting, if you will.”
And since the interior systems no doubt can hear us in their acoustic monitors, they actually are here. Not that the Insys Artilect would ever bring it up; strategy was not its province.
But he suppressed that thought, for now.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and sipped her coffee. Always the caffeinated, he recalled—she used it to drive herself harder. Several others around the table did the same, an amusing social echo.

“Then we are resolved on this course?” Redwing said with a light and conversational air.

Only Beth failed to get the message. Probably, he thought, because she had been down on the Bowl so long and had forgotten shipboard’s unspoken signals. She said, “I don’t know if we’ve resolved anything, Cap’n.”

“We’re going to give the Folk a nudge,” Redwing said. “Their reply was quite clear—they killed our coin array. They don’t want us knowing the local conditions well, to navigate by. If we were Earthside, that would be an act of war.”

Beth wouldn’t stand down. “A ‘nudge’? Despite all these problems? Unknowns? Risks?”

He leaned forward, extending his clasped hands. “There are always problems. My orders are to get us to Glory and see if we can colonize it. Extracting us from this strange … place … this shipstar … I see as my duty. To do so, I must impress on these aliens that we will not join the—what was their term? The one Beth reported?”

Redwing looked down the table at Beth, whose open
O
of a mouth told him she had not expected this. Maybe the ground truth of the Bowl had told her something he did not know? “Beth?”

“The … the Adopted.”

“Right. We’re not a damn bunch of orphans from Earth. We’re not going to get Adopted.”

Beth said, “In their eyes…,” and stopped.

“Yes?”

“We’ve been gone from Earth so long, all our relatives dead, who knows what has happened…” She looked forlorn for a moment, grasping for words, head down. “We might as well be orphans.”

He had not expected this. What had the Bowl done to her? “We’re officers of a ship, Science Officer Beth Marble. Humanity’s farthest excursion. We have a goal and we shall reach it. This Bowl interlude, however amazing, will be useful, but we shall go on. Is that understood?”

Long silence. Karl started to say something, his lips half-forming a word, but thought better of it. Fred was quite obviously biting his tongue, eyes studying the table as if it were a brilliant new discovery. Their faces closed up into pale masks with eyes looking everywhere but not at Beth or at him. Very well. “This was an exploratory discussion, folks. I appreciate a free airing of views, as always.”

Fred said, “Outcome pretty obvious. When we came in.”

Redwing let nothing show in his face. “I’m sorry, Officer Ojama? Your special area is geology, as I recall. And ship systems. You said…?”

“It was pretty obvious you had decided to fly into the jet. You wanted to get us used to it.” Only after saying this did Fred’s eyes jerk away from the table’s smooth obsidian finish and dart a look at Redwing.

Redwing did not let his feelings show, much less his surprise at Fred’s suddenly becoming a talker on something other than tech details.
Always remember that these people are damned smart. And odd. Not predictable.
“Quite so. It’s useful to hear how hard this is going to be. Also to know the purpose.”

“Which is?” Beth was still softly defiant. Her eyes glowed.

“Getting to Glory. Those are our mission orders. We’re carrying humanity to the stars. Beginning a process that ensures our species immortality.” They had all heard these terms, but maybe they needed to be reminded.

“We haven’t discussed other options,” Fred said, his eyes still holding firm on Redwing.

“I haven’t heard any proposed,” Redwing said, deliberately settling his cheek on his right palm, as if settling in to listen.

“We could—should—continue our conversation with the Folk. Edge them toward our point of view.” Beth said this stiffly, eyes on Redwing. “They have Tananareve and Cliff’s team, yes. But we have so many sleeping souls with us—”

“We have given them days already,” Clare Conway said. “And they attacked our coins. In a few more days, what else might they do?”

Redwing was happy with this support and decided to let them talk awhile, let the idea sink in.

Fred said, “Think about us as orphans. This thing, the Bowl, is so old—they must be used to expeditions from some nearby star coming out to look. So whatever alien species arrived, they were on a one-way trip. Just like us. That’s the Folk history. So they think of us the same way.”

“Makes sense,” Karl said. “They think the Bowl is so wonderful, of course smart species want to come and see it. Tourists who came and stayed.”

Fred grinned, a rare event. “Not like us, passersby.”

Redwing did not like the way this was going. He kept his tone measured and precise. “In the end, a ship is not a democracy. It’s a ship and there’s only one captain. I’m it. I have to decide.” This came out of him as a formula, but he had to say it.

“The Bowl teaches us a lot, Captain.” Beth spoke quietly, slowly, but firm and steady. “We should study it awhile before we just go on. Before we leave it behind. There’s so much to learn!”

“They could be just waiting us out,” Clare said. “They know our general flight plan. It demands that we have only a few crew up and consuming food while we’re on full-bore flight. Here, we’re in a solar system, of sorts. We’re catching their solar wind, what there is of it, and barely maintaining good sailing conditions. They know us. We don’t know them.”

Fred said, “They must have seen our magscoop flexing, struggling, trying out new patterns.” He nodded to Clare. “And we kept running, but barely.”

“It’s pretty obvious, now that I think about it, from their point of view,” Karl said. “They know this system intimately—hell, we don’t even know how they manage to run it!”

“So it’s likely they want to wait us out. Run low on supplies.” Clare looked around at the whole table. “Gives them more time to hunt down Cliff’s team, too.”

Redwing was glad to get some support without saying a word. “Y’know,” he said casually, “Magellan lost most of his crew when he sailed around the world.”

“Magellan didn’t make it home either,” Fred said. “And we have over a thousand souls sleeping aboard who count on us.”

Well, that backfired.
“They’re always in my calculations, Fred,” he said as warmly as he could.

“I still think—,” Beth began.

“That’s not a crew officer issue,” Redwing said firmly. “Not at all.”

Silence as it sank in. To his surprise, Karl said with a deliberate mild voice, “We do not know what we face.”

Redwing felt the tension rising in the room.
At least the Artilects don’t argue.
… “The human race has
never
known what it faced. We came out of Africa not knowing that deserts and glaciers lay ahead. Same here. If we have no respect from these Folk, we will be captives. Humanity will become
zoo animals
.”

This shocked them. Their eyes widened, blinked, mouths opened and closed with a snap.
Maybe they’ll remember their obligations. Where they came from.

They all looked at him long and hard. But Beth looked away—and in that moment he knew that he had them.

TWENTY
-
NINE

Tananareve was a useful test subject. Memor enjoyed experimenting with the primate.

Memor listened to the rumble of the fast train and ignored Bemor, who was working on his portable communicator. The primate was irked, eyes narrowed, after she heard some of Memor’s remarks about the difficulty of negotiating with their Captain. Tananareve did not know she carried embedded sensors that reported regularly to Memor’s diagnostic systems. When she got angry, her heart rate, arterial tension, and testosterone production increased. Quite interestingly, her stress hormones decreased.

Memor turned out of the line of sight and flourished a flat display of the primate response.

“Bemor, note this, please.”

Bemor idly cast a distracted glance. Memor sent the data set to him and he glanced at the curves on his comm. “How odd, that anger relieves stress in these primates.”

He sniffed. “With bad social effects, I would wager.”

“Why? It must have evolved in the wild—”

“Exactly. They feel the stress-lowering as a kind of pleasure. So to relieve anxieties, they fight. This is not good for a peaceful society. It may explain why they are out here, far from home, exploring.”

Memor paused. She differed with her brother over this area, which was, after all, her own realm of research. But … “You could be right. It seems an unlikely feature in a species we would make docile.”

“I note her left brain hemisphere becomes more stimulated as well. This may confer some aggressive abilities.”

Memor let this ride. The strumming metallic rhythms of the fast train were comforting, considering that they were moving with truly astronomical speeds down magnetically pulsing tubes, over elegant curve trajectories, arcing across and within the Bowl’s long slopes. They had voyaged now for several slumbers. The fast tubes were cramped, and their outer metal skins at times heated to smarting temperatures through inductive losses. Tight, unamusing quarters even for Folk. Uninspired edibles, with little live game at all. Memor passed the last wriggling forkfish to Bemor; it flapped weakly and gave a soft cry of despair. He took it with relish and crunched happily, snapping the bones. The heady, acid flavor of the forkfish filled the cabin. Tananareve made a clenched face and covered her mouth and nose with a cloth.

All this travel to rendezvous with the proximate locus the autoprobes had found—among the icefields of the hull, in ready range of the Ice Minds—for the vagrant primates.

The renegade primates had tripped detectors among the renegade Sil first. Now this. Memor’s attempts to keep a distant trace on the primates was well enough, Bemor thought, but “Given to excess,” he had remarked, “when not well policed.”

Several ready examples had happened a short while ago.

First came the incident in which Sil hirelings had patrolled the precincts outside the recently bombed Sil city. There were minor traces of the primates in the area, but the bombardment had eliminated most of the sites where identification would have been simple. Instead there were vague sightings and some detector probables. Bemor had disliked Memor’s delegation of patrolling to a band of Sil unloyal to the central Sil hierarchy. They attempted a poorly thought-through maneuver to block the primates’ movements across a plain. The Sil accompanying the Late Invaders managed to kill and badly injure several of their blockers. There was one report that a car of Late Invaders had taken part in the action. Since Memor knew this same party had killed a local party in a magcar before, and taken part in an insurrection from which Memor herself narrowly escaped, this latest incident was no surprise.

The second incident was more troubling. The same Sil and Late Invaders party had been glimpsed by a routine patrol skirting the hull territories. Only one clear identification, but enough. Yet by the time automatic patrols had arrived, the party was gone.

Now a third report, in a region housing old intelligences. The portal near the Kahalla shrine had triggered an abnormality alert. This signal came to the attention of resident monitors for the Zone. Since Memor had a tag on such genetic identifiers, she heard of this just a short while ago, when already in the long magnetic train tube network with Bemor.

“They move in crafty fashion,” Bemor had observed. “Doubtless this is not a signature of Late Invader cleverness. They do not know our territories. They must be guided by the Sil.”

Memor sent a fan-array in a flutter of subtle, doubting yellows. “I doubt the Sil have such abilities either. We have contained them in their urge to expand for a great long time now. Many generations have passed since Sil could roam in exploring parties.”

Bemor considered this. “They are also a rambunctious species, still. Some longlives ago, they sought access to the strictly nonsentient Zones.”

“I do recall.” Memor quickly accessed her Undermind, and the memory unfolded for her quick review. “Outright demands for territory, claiming that their species had spread quickly over their homeworld due to a mixed genetic and social imperative.”